


They Can Never Know

by TheSigyn, zabjade



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 13:50:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9387938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/zabjade/pseuds/zabjade
Summary: “It’s a show, love. Like everything else. Put it on when you need to, take it off when they’re not looking. You don’t have to feel it. You just have to look it.” Spike helps Buffy keep up appearances. Early season six.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by the lovely Ree

 

   Spike ran his hands down one of Buffy’s silk shirts, the fabric soft and soothing against his fingers. It was smooth, beige, just a shade paler than her hair, and just as shiny. She wore something like it the day she decided to tell the Scoobies how grateful she was for being dragged out of hell. That would do. There was a skirt in here that probably matched okay.... 

   He pushed through the hangers and held the soft skirt up. Probably okay. Didn’t look much different from some of the outfits he’d seen her in before. Length of the shirt was a little hard to judge, though.... He held the skirt and the shirt up against himself and looked down. He wished, not for the first time, that he could see himself in a mirror. Yeah, they probably looked okay together....

   “Going on a hot date?” Buffy asked from the door.

   Spike looked up. She was in her robe, and her hair was wet and properly brushed for once. She did look better. Less like a lost waif.  “Are you?”

   “I hadn’t planned on it.”

   “Won’t bother matching it with a thong, then. Shame, that.”

   The teasing slipped off his tongue without properly talking to his brain about it first, but Buffy just rolled her eyes. “You weren’t going through my underwear again, were you?”

   He couldn’t help but smile, a soft little thrill of affection filling his unbeating heart. God, she was adorable. “Not tonight,” he said. “How do these look?” He gestured to the outfits he had arranged on the bed. The bed that he’d made. After Buffy had vacated it.

   She stared at them, expression blank for a moment before she really focused. Shirts matched with pants, jackets matched with shirts; for some of the outfits he’d even pinned earrings to the collars or hung necklaces around the top of the hanger or stuffed socks into the pockets, all ready to go. 

   “And you did all that?”

   He shrugged. “Yeah.”

   She stared down and touched one of the silk shirts. “How could you do all this?”

   “Who do you think planned outfits for the bot?” Spike muttered without looking at her.

   “I thought Dawn... or Willow....”

   “They didn’t know how you dressed,” he said quietly. “Not like I did.”

   “I don’t... I don’t know what to say.”

   “Don’t say anything, love.” He barely resisted the urge to reach out and stroke her cheek as he whispered, “They can never know.”

 

***

 

   “And just how the bloody hell are you planning on keeping it from them?” Spike asked, poking his head through the door.

   Buffy looked up from where she was curled up in the bed. “What?”

   Spike strolled in, cool as you please. “You make a big deal about it, Buffy.  _ They can never know _ , you say. How are you going to keep it from them?”

   “I just... I just wasn’t gonna tell them,” Buffy said, her voice slow and low as it had been since that first day, when she was speaking at all. “And neither will you. How did you get in here?”

   “Invite’s still good, innit?”

   “No,” Buffy muttered, burying her head in her pillow.

   Spike ignored her and plonked down on the end of her bed, as if he belonged there or something, like a spoiled cat. “Well, better get your disinvite spell going, then, hadn’t you? ‘Cause I’m coming in anyway.”

   “What are you doing here?”

   “Checking up on you,” Spike said. “Your mates were at the Bronze, and you weren’t.”

   They’d all been worried for her, too. They were bunched up in a knot in the corner, ignoring the music, talking about Buffy. Buffy, Buffy, something’s wrong with Buffy, she didn’t want to come out with us, what are we going to do, how are we going to bring her out of this, on and on and on. And Willow muttering about how she was  _ supposed to be grateful _ , and Tara saying  _ we just can’t understand about the pain of hell and can’t expect her to adjust immediately _ , and Xander saying he’s sure she’s fine,  _ she’ll snap out of it any day now. Any day _ . And Anya frankly not caring and sneaking looks at a bridal magazine which she’d hidden in a newspaper, because Xander still wouldn’t let her tell anyone their “big secret” which Spike had figured out the first day before Buffy had died, even.  

   “I didn’t feel like going out.”

   “Or like getting dressed,” Spike noted, looking at the shirt she’d been wearing for the last three days. She smelled like she hadn’t bathed since the shower Dawn had put her in that first day. She hadn’t washed her hair, either. He could still smell the grave dirt in it.

   Buffy’s face twisted, and she grunted. “Go away.”

   “If you can’t keep up appearances, they’re going to guess. Bunch of brainless ninnies, but they aren’t completely brain dead.”

   “I can’t,” she muttered, ignoring the dig at her friends. “I’m just so tired.”

   Spike narrowed his eyes at her. “Get up.”

   “What?”

   “Up. Get. Up.”

   “Go to hell.”

   “Later,” he grunted, as if his life hadn’t gone straight there the moment she plunged from that tower. He seized her arm and pulled her bodily out of the bed. That worked. She got angry. She slapped him and then held her hand back in a fist to punch him. Spike grabbed that wrist and dragged her, without looking at her, into the bathroom, where he dumped her on the toilet.

   She hadn’t even tried to stop him very hard. He knew she was stronger than that. “Look,” he said as she opened her mouth to protest. He turned on the warm water in the bath tub. “You want to keep this big a secret from your mates, you’re gonna have to fake it a bit. That means put up appearances. Put normal on, like a costume.”

   “I can’t do that,” Buffy muttered, leaning her head against the wall.

   “Dru managed it,” Spike said. That caught her attention. “If a brain cracked serial killer can pretend to be normal for an hour to get on a cruise ship, you sure as hell can. It’s a show, love. Like everything else. Put it on when you need to, take it off when they’re not looking.” He took up her hair brush and went down to his knees. As opposed to the brusque roughness of a second ago, he slowed down now that he had her where he wanted her. “You don’t have to feel it. You just have to look it.”

   “How?”

   “You go through the motions,” he said. He reached up and pulled her hair out of the knot it had become around the hair tie. God, he loved her hair. It was wrong to leave it so neglected like this. Very, very gently he started running the brush through a few strands, trying not to pull at the tangles. The key was to start at the bottom. Short, simple strokes, starting higher each time. “It only takes a few minutes. Make yourself get clean. Make yourself do the hair and the clothes. You can skip the makeup, that one’s harder, but it works real well as a mask to hide behind, so you might want to try it, if you’re up to it.” He added in a few more strands. Maybe a quarter of her hair wasn’t a tangle now.

   “I can’t,” she said.

   “Why not?”

   “It takes forever to think about what to wear. It’s so complicated, and I can’t... think....”

   Buffy always used color to show her mood. Spike had realized that. Fashion was the one bit of her old pre-slayer life she had clung to. “Stick to black and white,” he said quietly.

   Her face crumpled a little. “I can’t sort it out like that,” she said quietly. “Nothing goes with anything anymore, I can’t....”

   Spike couldn’t help with that. But with the clothes.... “I’ll help,” he said. He turned off the water. “Get into that. It’ll make you feel better.”

   Buffy sighed, world weary, and then glared at him. For a second he stood there, completely bewildered, and then realized. Right. Naked Buffy. He’d fallen into the same pattern as when Dru had been at her most childlike and had felt so utterly unsexual right then, it hadn’t even occurred to him.

   “Oh. Right. I’ll, uh... clear out then, shall I? I’ll be in your room.”

   “Doing what?”

   “Costume changes.” 

***  

 

   Buffy sat down on the edge of her bed, pulling her already fully closed robe even tighter around her upper body. She hadn’t realized this was what he meant to do. That was at least a week where she wouldn’t have to think about what to wear. Spike hung the sorted outfits carefully in the closet, one after another, handling it all very cleanly and carefully. She couldn’t imagine anyone doing something like this for her, not even her mom. Maybe Willow… except she hadn’t really seemed much like Willow anymore… and if Buffy could bring herself to talk to her, which she couldn’t. She just… couldn’t. 

   She was so tired. All she wanted to do was crawl under the blankets and sleep until the entire world just went away. No more harshness, no more noise. No more friends or Dawn constantly  _ needing _ at her. 

   Spike stopped his methodical movement as he finished with the outfits. She looked up at him. He was just standing there, waiting, but not like he was expecting her to do anything. He didn’t need her to talk or be happy, and she could almost kiss him for it. If she had had the energy. Weird thought. It should have given her the wiggins, but there was just a sort of numbness. 

   “That’s that, then. Let’s get you up for a tick,” Spike finally said, taking her by the arm and pulling her up from her bed again. A spark of annoyance tried to kindle into a flame of emotion, but it fizzled out before she could grab it. “Here we go, now.”

   He pulled back the covers, then glanced at her with a raised brow, silently inviting her to get in. She looked from him to the bed, then back again. She wanted to just shuck her robe and collapse onto it, maybe dragging Spike down with her to use as a comforting teddy bear. But he wasn’t, and she couldn’t, because….

   “I….”

   “Relax, Slayer,” he said with an eyeroll. “Not after your virtue, here. You need to rest up if you want to pull off your grand performance.”

   She nodded jerkily and got into bed. “There,” he said, instead of leaving right away. He pulled the blanket over her, tucking her in like a small child. “When they’re out of the room, when they leave you alone, take it. Just lie down, disappear, don’t perform if you don’t need to.”

   She nodded softly, and really wanted to grab his hand or something. He seemed like the only thing that wasn’t harsh, didn’t make sharp edged spears of demands that she be the same as she used to be. It was nice to just be with someone as dead as she felt. 

   As she drifted down into the dark nothing that was the closest she could get to peace, he started to go. She almost called him back to stay with her, sit with her maybe, or maybe… maybe….

   No. She couldn’t invite him into the bed with her to just hold her for a moment. He had already proven that once you gave him an invite like that, he’d assume it meant forever. And she couldn’t just tell him what it was he was starting to mean to her. It wasn’t right that he should mean anything.

  He could never know. 

 


End file.
